On Self-Identity

Day 12

The belief that ethics is intrinsic to reality, that there is some ultimate good and evil, some certain should and should not do, is either a possibly vain hope, or a desperate denial of the obvious. I do not say that it is not possible that there be such a thing, but I simply say that I am not convinced of it. As we have also stated, ethics is such that any action whatsoever can be justified. That is, it is no use arguing or saying that such and such action cannot be justified, or that it is never justified, or that it cannot be justified in some manner. This is too patently false. We might say that some action cannot be justified in a system, given certain constraints, rules, and subjects, but that only holds valid for the system. It seems certainly reasonable that there can be another system in which the opposite is rendered valid, that the idea which was not possible to justify in some system is possible to justify in another system. Further more, circumstances may arise which a system was too prepared for. We can say do not steal, but rare is the lad who will not steal a bit of bread if he is starving, for example. Or perhaps that is an example of an ethical system which is vague, or which has movable boundaries, or uses general guidelines instead of rules. My positing the possibility of so many changes and types of things using just the concepts of system, and stealing bread if starving, is meant to show that complexities that can take place just under this simple series of states. Real world examples of ethics could, we can imagine and expect, be much more complicated.

But given that ethics is founded upon not firm basis in the depths of reality, or at least that I have seen no evidence that it is so, what gives? Why does an argument, such as the idea that anyone seeing a child drown in a shallow pool will save it at no risk and negligible cost, make so much sense to the lot of us? Ideas like utilitarian ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, the golden rule, pity, charity, etc have such an effect upon us/ Certainly they have not had a great effect upon everyone, and all of them have been argued against numerous times in numerous ways, but still there seems to be a strange power in them. That is, how do we explain the apparent fact that we can impart an ethics to another person, or that we can often recognize the ethics of another person as if they were our own? You may have observed that the majority of us do not habitually steal, assault, or murder. We typically are kind to each other, take pity on one another, and expect a general form of politeness from each other. For myself I can attest to being helped in tight situations by a very great number of people, people scattered across numerous different cultures and continents, when they did not have to, and in a manner that I recognize as if I was at my home, seeing acts of kindness and morality that I have happened across a hundred times. I engage in these myself at times; I certainly think that I act in an ethical manner.

So what is an ethical manner? In very general terms, it is acting in such a way, or believing in such a world, that some person Y should do some act X. There are further elaboration that can take place of course, specifying under what conditions, being specific to certain people or positions, being about the self or others – but these are addendum's and complications meant to try and fit the idea of 'X should Y' to some real world situation. The basis of an ethical statement I take to be of the form 'X should Y'. To act in an ethical manner is to act as if this is the case. to judge another in an ethical manner is to judge them as if this is the case. We can judge another by having an emotional or logical opinion of them based on what they do, or expecting them to act in some manner deriving from the supposed truth of our ethical belief. Now, certainly there are differences between the types of ethics we can have, but there does seem to be a great deal of overlap in many cases. People are, generally speaking rather more alike than they are different. Suffering from the same sort of pains, happy with the same sort of joys, and forming communities with others where everybody follows ethical rules that are at least adjacent to one another. Generally 'evil' acts need to overcome a hurdle to be accepted, or are rejected. Though here we shall not go into the specifics, there is one This issue is the alien.

Imagine if you will that one day we are contacted by an alien race. I don't mean one that is similar to us, or from far away, or carbon based even – rather, imagine if you will one that is almost nothing at all like us. Should we expect this alien to have our ethics? If you believe that there is an intrinsic ethics in reality, the answer is yes. However, I think it reasonable to think that the answer could be no. This alien species might eat their young, murder indiscriminately, steal like there is no tomorrow, lie with every word, and do things that are so vile we do not even conceive of them yet. Or, they might have an ethics that is an exact copy of some christian doctrine, or Buddhist precepts, or the ethics of the Aztecs, the most ardent communists, or whatsoever may be. In any case, I do not think it impossible that any of those option may be the case. That is, I don't expect anything in particular from an alien ethics. There is an argument to be made that we should expect certain things, like that they form groups for mutual benefit, or have some concept of manners, because any civilization without such a thing could not survive for long. Yet, this is pure speculation. These aliens might have an entirely different metabolism, for example, or have a group mind or live in stars, or travel through time backwards – I do not know, for I have not seen them yet. It may well be the case that that idea is true, and I think it has a lot of support, but it is for now still a speculation. I shouldn't expect to really feel that it is verified or not until we had met another species – although there are probably interesting questions to ask here on earth about the ethics of humans vs rodents, or birds, or ants...

My personal question though is not whether we should expect the aliens to have ethics like ours, but rather weather we should expect them to have an ethics at all. After all, it doesn't seem quite appropriate to say that ants or wolves have an ethics yet. The question remains of moral imperative. Is a dog that knows it is a 'bad dog', or a cat that knows it is 'in trouble' actually sorry for the action? Is it appropriate to say that they think they 'should' do something? Their reactions certainly seems to take a very similar form to ours. Is emotion necessary? I have been speaking of should as if that concept was clear, but perhaps it isn't. What I should do I want to do, what you should do I want you to do. I am sad or angry when the should rule is not followed. Why is this?

I think that perhaps this is because the should rules are baked into the world. After all, I can state them and feel them, so they are things in the world. The gem-shape they have, like all gems, is part of the whole world. We can often get guidelines from our ethics when we don't know what to do, and we can feel energy shifting in response to our ethics:When we feel that we are doing something unethical we sometimes have to push ourselves harder to do the act, and sometimes we feel a thrill that pushes us to make the act. We are repulsed by evil things, and attracted by good things. Who has not, at some point, drawn strength to do something difficult by affirming or recalling that you were doing something good, moral, and just?

What I am describing of course is an ethical system, a structure of the world, one just as real as a body, a language, or a subway. Now subways of course don't seem to have intrinsic ethics of the sort we do. Yet, we almost expect something similar of them. Who has not had some system, a train, a car, a computer, do some action where your response is, first, something like “That should not have happened”. That is, we can use the the same, or closely related, language to describe how a car or a legislative system acts as we do for a person. (Congress should do this, or should not do that. Eric should do this, or should not do that, etc.) We have the exception baked into us that something should happen. That the sun should rise tomorrow, even though Hume shows that is not certain. If we did not do this, if we had no system for imagining a 'should', then why would we expect anything? We tend to act as life is going to be the same most of the time. It is true that many things change, but generally speaking most of what happens in our daily lives is rather similar to what happens in the rest of our daily lives. Hot and cold, up and down, future and past – we can even imagine being placed into the body of a fox or a bird, flying on wings or living as a beggar or a prince. That we can do this seems to me to be based on the idea that most of the world is the same. I am, in effect, rejecting the idea that we cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat. We can at least imagine it, even if knowing it is beyond our ken.

Speaking scientifically we might say that we are acting like future-imagining machines. When something act in such a way that it does not do what it should do, our world is disrupted; things are not as we thought they were. We can of course react to this rather commonplace event by making our idea of would will happen weaker, by 'should' being something more like 'probably will' instead of 'has to'. We can complicate the conditions under which a 'should' is thought of at certain strengths, such as 'the rock has to fall' or 'the dog probably will chase the ball'. We can do this with ethics too, such as when we think that 'I should not injure somebody, unless they are trying to injure me first', instead of a base 'I should not injure somebody'. Ethics might be more complicated and layered as well, such as something ike: 'you should to injure people'...if you are good you will not injure people....only bad people injure people...that person injured me...that person is a bad person..I should stay away from bad people...bad people aren't trustworthy...etc...I think that if did this to an absolute extent, we might run into some issues however.

We can take the weakening of ethics to an extreme extent in several ways. We can make the self-referential layers so complicated that it is either too confusing to figure out what to do, or we can make them so convoluted that any action at all can be justified. This is the same as the extreme extent of just weakening the 'should' idea to a 'probably will', and eventually to a 'possibly, but no way to be sure one way or another' expectation. This is the same as getting rid of the 'should' belief about the world altogether. We can do this in two ways, about others and about ourselves. That is, it may be a (slightly)different action to say that they should or should not do something, and that I should or should not do something. We referred to Kant's categorical imperative and the golden rule as ethical rules earlier in the piece, after all.

If the should of others falls away, then the world becomes nigh unusable. If the 'should' of ourselves falls away, then we know not what to expect of ourselves. I think it is obvious how problematic the first one is. We lose our foundation of trust in ourselves. Also, because we and the world are the same, the same is true of ourselves. We would know not what to expect of ourselves, would give up any semblance of trusting in our free will as directed in any way, turning it into a random will. This I couldn't continence, for a random will isn't a free will of me. It is a free will without boundaries, but I question rather it isn't an unfree will. It seems something in between, but more akin to a rock than a person. That is, a random will would be a sort of unknown will. It does seem like it could be the case, but if it is so, then whats the point? I'd become a flip of the coin, without a flipper.

So we assume that the will of ourselves is not random in this sense, that there is some direction in it. That we are free and we choose. Though, of course, there is still the big mystery there of how and why. So, if there is no should of the self, then the will of myself appears random. Conversely, if there is a will of the self, then the should of me appears as not random. That is, there is some ethics that can be applied to me, some structure of the world. We seek to reduce world faults in order to survive as ourselves. Indeed, certain parts of our ethical beliefs are very likely to be foundational. I have heard it said that no one thinks himself a villain ,and that you have to forgive yourself if you want to heal. Thus, I expect some sort of an ethics to be intrinsic to us.

I don't expect a certain type of ethics, but I do expect that an ethics of some sort should exist, some way of acting and being that has a 'should' attitude towards things. In the form X + Y → C, I expect some sort of X and/or Y in every being like me. That is, at the very least, every human being like me. The necessity of alien ethics is, I think, still open.